Today we announce a new ‘Listening’ service for businesses of all sizes.

In today’s market there are many tools that claim to be designed for Social Media Monitoring. However most of them are immature or cover only a part of the spectrum. Many were derived from Campaign Management, Web Behavior Analytics, Trend Analysis or Reputation Management tools and therefore totally miss the most essential part.

To really Listen you must React to what is said: that is the only way you can show you have really listened! And that is what demanding customers in the 21st century expect.

BrandReact was designed not just to monitor the Social Media space, but to monitor the entire Web and to make sure that your company can React to everything that is said about your brands, your company or your staff in an appropriate manner.

The service is currently available and is being tested by a select number of companies.  If you are interested in a demonstration or would like to test the service yourself, please contact info@BrandReact.com and we will accommodate you if possible.

For more information go to http://BrandReact.com or visit our Blog for interesting articles on the subject of ‘Listening’

The original ad from the charming campaign that blitzed the internet recently took home a Creative Emmy Award for Best Commercial of the Year. 

This is a great example of how a Social Media campaign can augment a regular TV ad campaign and let both go viral.

What is remarkable is that they actually responded to Tweets and FaceBook postings with a video! They created over 200 videos, that are real funny too!

It is great what you can accomplish when you listen to your customers (and prospects)…Hats off for Proctor & Gamble who own the Old Spice brand.

Watch this excellent CNN video on the subject:

Here is one of the responses from Twitter:

I found this nifty tool for word clouds at http://wordle.net You can paste an article or any text into a box on the site and it generates the cloud in an instant. You can then customize it by changing the layout (horizontal/vertical), colors and font.  Very cool!

I used my WhitePaper on The case of BP and Social Media and it produced this word cloud:

I wonder who the Chief Listening Officer of Nabisco is…but he (or she) is doing a great job…

Look at these ads for Wheat Thins….Wheat Thins are a popular baked snack cracker found in North America, distributed by Nabisco, a subsidiary of Kraft Foods Global Inc.

These are great examples of a company that listens to what is said about their brand and reacts on it!

Every company should be listening like that, and react in such a way that they turn their customers into raving fans!

Four years ago Social Media played no role in the elections.  This year they will play an important role, in four years Social Media will dominate the elections.

My prediction it that four years from now a transparent, honest, charismatic leader with a sensible and understandable program can win the elections as an independent, without a boat load of money and without traditional party politics.  All thanks to Social Media.

That means that this election, the Democratic as well as the Republican party need to study the effects of Social Media and learn to listen to their constituency instead of thinking they can determine what is good for the ‘little’ people and play tricks on them to manipulate the masses.

This is their best opportunity to learn and not be wiped out in the next elections.

Just like in politics, Social Media will have a dramatic effect on business.  Most people underestimate this. In fact some are actively downplaying the effect it will have, saying that many people do not use computers like the ‘FaceBook generation’.

It is true that three years ago, when I started using FaceBook, my 18-year old son said: “Dad, you are too old for this”.  Well he was wrong…today FaceBook is dominated by corporations – not by teenagers.  And this trend will continue.  With Twitter as the main source of newsgathering for the likes of CNN, we will see a different world emerge rapidly.

The case of BP is a good example of how the rules of the old economy do not apply any longer.  The attitude BP took when the oil first stared spilling was a traditional one.  Four years ago they would have gotten away with it.  Not today, and certainly not in the future.

Companies should be aware that listening to their customers and acting transparently and responsibly is the way of the future.  In practical terms, companies have to adhere to a “Triple Bottom Line” which means expanding the traditional reporting framework to take into account ecological and social performance in addition to financial performance or as the United Nations ratified it: a focus on ‘Planet, People and Profit’.  They need to use Social Media to accomplish this.

The same is true for politics.  The days of backroom discussions on how to manipulate the message to control the masses are over.  Politicians will have to present themselves as socially and ecologically responsible with a clear message on what they can do for the people in economic terms.

We just need to get rid of the archaic, 18^th century district based election system and give the people the right to choose the right candidate.

BP failed to Listen
Acting like the good old days are still here does not work anymore

If the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had happened some months ago, it would not have been such a PR disaster for BP.

Why? Social media!

In today’s world there are new rules on how to deal with your customers or with the public at large. It will be difficult for BP to even survive as a company. People already pass by the BP station when they need gas?

So what were BP’s mistakes and how can we learn from this?

First, BP gave incorrect information. They said that the amount of oil gushing from the well was much less than in reality. Normally they would have been able to get away with this, because experts that had a different estimate would easily have been silenced. Not anymore! The counter-estimates were massively broadcasted over the social networks and easily picked up by the news media.
Lesson 1: Be transparent – the truth comes out real fast.

Secondly BP did not listen to the public. If they had looked at just the Tweet Stream about the oil spill, the would have noticed much earlier how big the outrage was. It took a long time for BP’s executive management to realize this.
Lesson 2: Listen to the customers and act on their concerns

The CEO Tony Hayworth did not even visit the area until a month after the disaster, so people concluded he did not care. He thought he was managing the crisis and belonged behind his desk, but he should have realized that he is the face of the company and therefore he should be out there showing compassion.
Lesson 3: CEOs need to be in the eye of the public

BP stated on multiple occasions that they were prepared to pay for the cleanup. However, the amount of red tape people had to wade through to get the permission and the funds for their cleanup operation was enormous. It took weeks to get BP’s approval. People that lived in communities that would soon be affected by the spill, were making plans and were sharing these through social media.
Lesson 4: Companies better be prepared to respond very fast.

BP launched a $50 million PR campaign, that backfired in multiple ways. First of all it came way too late; companies don’t have the time anymore to use their regular PR methods and plan an ad campaign in times of disaster. Second, the money spent was highlighted by the social networks and became part of the outrage; BP should have given this money to the fishermen, who’s livelihood was taken away.
Lesson 5: Traditional PR methods don’t work in a viral Internet era.

Following legal advise BP placed a gag-order on the staff. Bad mistake! Not saying anything used to work and keep the company safe from saying the wrong things, which could be used against them in court. But in this case, the furious crowd brought down the stock price by more than 30% costing the shareholders over $30 billion so far and brought down the revenue as well. People are ashamed to be seen at a BP gas station and the US government is pulling all contracts with BP for the military. All this brings a real chance that even a conglomerate like BP can be brought to it’s knees and possibly go under due to the reaction of the masses.
Lesson 6: Legal advise needs to be updated with the ‘laws’ of social networking

What can companies do to avoid this?

The only way out to avoid this is for companies to really embrace social media to connect more closely with their customers or as in the case of BP the public at large. Companies need to follow online conversations across social platforms such as Twitter and FaceBook, as well as on blogs and news sites, and direct what they hear to the appropriate department for follow-up. This would allow them to respond in real-time.

But that would be an impossible task. There is simply too much to listen to, happening everywhere, all at once. Any single point which is presumed to do the listening for an entire organization – whether an individual or a department – will simply be overwhelmed, drowning in the stream of data.

That is why companies should make listening and transparency part of the corporate values and their standard operating procedures. This entails involving the staff at all levels and really showing by their actions they have listened. That’s where companies will find great success in the future and avoid PR disasters.

By appointing a Chief Listening Officer to be those ears and the voice of the company, they bring that feeling and spirit inside and change the way the company works from the core out. Therefore this has to be a Board Level position, responsible for bringing everyone – customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders – together so that everyone is in agreement and standing behind the same core values.

Sure, customers might grumble, but they also praise for a job well done. That positive relationship should be honored – and reinforced. As companies reinforce the positive, they create a virtuous cycle of interactions, which becomes terrifically difficult to disrupt. When that’s gone on long enough, and broadly enough, the companies have effectively created their own army – in the post-modern, guerilla sense of the word – who will go out there and fight for them and their brand when the haters and trolls and chaos-makers bear down upon them. These people feel connected to the company, and will connect to one another because of the passion they share around the products and the business.

How would this have changed things for BP?

If BP had have embraced Social Networking from the start, much of the PR disaster could have been avoided. After all, this ecological disaster is something that could have happened to any of the big oil companies; singling out BP as the villain would not have happened, if they would have handled their PR better.

If BP had been transparent and upfront about the amount of oil being spilled and the potential impact, they would not have lost their credibility and much of the PR damage could have been avoided.

This means that BP would have had to use all available channels to broadcast their message, both online and through the traditional media; not a $50 million ad campaign a month after the disaster, but simple tweets and videos through Twitter and YouTube.

Listening to the concerns of the local people would have been a great way to learn what kind of resources were required to relieve local issues. Small amounts of money could have done wonders and created raving fans instead of angry fishermen.

Top-executives cannot hide any longer. They have to deal with their customers on a daily basis. CEO Tony Hayward would have picked up signals early, and would have been on the first plane to Louisiana; showing his concern and not trying to downplay the catastrophe.

An active Listening Policy in place would have created an early warning system and a fast track to answering concerns. Hearing from the people on the ground and getting this message straight to the top, cuts through a lot of red tape and gets things done right away.

BP’s lawyers and PR consultants should have been properly trained to respond adequately and to deal with the enormous stream of information. They should have involved the whole company; not to randomly throw out messages, but to have a controlled, but fast answer.

This might have avoided a loss of value far greater than the cleanup costs it is facing.

<<Download the PDF version of this White Paper: The case of BP and Social Media>>

In ‘Twittering with results” Twitter Pioneer Dick Raman is clear about the power of Twitter: “Companies that do not participate, are lost.”

In his book the Social Media Expert explains that companies never before had such a powerful tool at their disposal. “Companies need to listen to their customers and they can do just that with Twitter,” Raman stresses. The IT Entrepreneur has a web-based service – Tweeteronix – to help companies to manifest themselves on Twitter. He built an application that helps you create a group of “followers” and hold their attention.  The English version of his book was released last year and the Dutch version in January of this year.

Creating goodwill

“It is incredible to see what goodwill you can create through a medium like Twitter,” an enthusiastic Raman explains. “When someone asks a question or says something about your company, you can respond immediately. That is much more efficient and more effective than a complicated telephone system for customer service.  After pressing a lot of buttons, the customer can finally talk to someone and get an answer.  But the answer reached just one person. If your customer service staff would Twitter, they could reach a much larger group. The market also sees that you’ve responded appropriately. That is the best advertisement! ”

Listening Chief

He advocates a ‘CLO’ in the top-management of all major companies. “A Chief Listening Officer at Board level, who is responsible for listening to customers and dealing with what is said about the company or the brand. Twitter, but also LinkedIn, FaceBook, blogs and other online networks and communities, are making it easy to listen. ”

In the open

”Hiding is not possible anymore”, says Raman. “Because of social networks, everything will soon be out in the open. There is always someone that puts his or her experience or observation online. So it is very harmful for your company, when you are not responding, ” says the author. “Customers expect it of you. You’d better make sure that you are on top of what is said in the market, especially when you are in a difficult situation. “  And that is not all you can do with Twitter. “You can use social networks for marketing, recruitment, or even as a sales channel.”

Twittering CEOs

A CEO who is happily tweeting? Dick Raman himself was one, as the founder of IT company TIE Holding NV. “My coach almost had a heart attack when he discovered that I was blogging at the time of the IPO in 2000. Sending information about the company into the world like that, was entirely taboo, ” he laughs. “Now the consensus has turned 180 degrees. Today it is almost impossible not to. Indeed, there are many success stories of companies and their executives that managed to capture the attention on the web in a good way, ” he says.?”Take the Zappos online store. The CEO, ‘Tony’, put Zappos in the picture with an active Twitter policy. That attracted the attention of the number 1 webstore, Amazon, that acquired Zappos for $900 million.” Raman calls Dutch Airline KLM as prime example of how a successful transport company can use social media for dealing with their customers.

Inspiration

Dick sees so much good coming from social media, that he believes everyone should try it. “People call it a hype, but they do not understand it yet. Twitter is indeed a phenomenon that you do not ‘get’ right away. ” acknowledges Raman, who is a software builder by trade. For inspiration, it’s nice to look at www.twittergids.nl. Here you’ll see references to people who are happily tweeting.” said Dick, who is in the Dutch Twitter Top 100 on this site himself.

Published with permission of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways)

Do you know what your customers are
saying about your business, your products,
your services? Do you care? You should.

Before social networking on the internet
became so pervasive, studies have
shown that a satisfied customer will tell 4
other people. A dissatisfied customer will
tell 20. So it would take 20 new customers
to repair the damage one dissatisfied
customer could cause.

Internet social networking sites such
as Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn,
and Craig’s List have changed all that.
Now one unhappy customer can easily
tell hundreds, and their connections could
expand that number into thousands, even
millions.

Can your business afford that damage?
Can you reverse it, prevent it, even use
social networking to positively promote
your company and its products and advertise
for FREE?

Do you know what is being said about
your business on the internet? Is it hurting
you or helping you?

React to your customer’s concerns
and complaints! It will be your best marketing
effort at the lowest cost!

There is a big issue for the regular news media, to determine if something that was tweeted, is actually true.  Today I experienced something that I believe answered that question.

Today is Memorial Day in the Netherlands.  At 8 pm there is always a ceremony on Dam Square in Amsterdam where there is a 2-minute silence to commemorate the dead, followed by the laying of wreaths by the Queen and many different organizations.

I was in Miami, on the phone with my Mother in The Netherlands, when at the end of the 2 minutes silence, there was noise, panic and the Queen was rushed away.  My Mother said: “There are shots fired, they are taking the Queen away, people are hurt.” So I tweeted: “Shots fired in Amsterdam at the Queen during Dutch Memorial Day – wounded people are cared for”.

Within seconds all kinds of people started to tweet back that it there were no shots fired, somebody collapsed and a fence fell over, which caused a panic and some people were hurt.

So what is the lesson here?  Well someone should just report what he or she knows…other people will confirm or deny and within a few minutes the real story will emerge!

For the news media this would be a pretty reliable method to determine if it is reliable enough to report on the news.

We really are past the days that the World’s News Leader can wait for hours until they have confirmation from their own sources, before they report on an event.

In Twitter’s development Google group, API lead Ryan Sarver tried to re-assure developers regarding Twitter’s recent moves to acquire or develop apps and effectively make other 3rd party apps obsolete.

He explains that the main motivation behind the acquisition of Tweetie was to remove the confusion that many new users would find when visiting the app store looking for “Twitter” and never finding what they were looking for because most apps wouldn’t actually be called Twitter.

What is interesting is that Twitter is on a crusade to make sure that 3rd party apps do not call themselves something with the word ‘Twitter’.  In fact Twitter is threatening to sue companies that do.  Now they want to clear up the confusion by acquiring Tweetie and calling it ‘Twitter for iPhone’?

It will be very interesting to see what will happen at ‘Chirp’, Twitter’s first Developer conference in San Francisco on the 14th of April.  How will Twitter cope with the questions developers undoubtedly have?  I guess we will find out a week later when the ‘creme de la creme ‘ of Twitter will meet independently of Twitter Inc in New York for the ’140 Characters’ conference.  These are interesting times…

Here is Ryan’s email:

I wanted to email everyone and share my thoughts on the acquisition from Friday, the communication around it and where we are going from here. We’re incredibly excited about Chirp, and I think an open dialogue going into it is important. I look forward to meeting many of you there and continuing the discussion.

We love the Twitter ecosystem and work hard every day to help support you and make the platform you are building on as successful as it can be for everyone involved. We love the variety that developers have built around the Twitter experience and it’s a big part of the success we’ve seen. However when we dug in a little bit we realized that it was causing massive confusion among user’s who had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time. They would head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a new user wouldn’t find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost user for all of us. This means that we were missing out an opportunity to grow the userbase which is beneficial for the health of the entire ecosystem. Focus on growing and serving the userbase is beneficial to everyone in the ecosystem and more opportunities become available with a larger audience. We believe strongly that the ecosystem is critical to our success and this move doesn’t change that. We have analytics that show our most engaged users are ones that use SMS, twitter.com AND a 3rd-party application. It further proves that there are different audiences and needs that we can never meet on our own and we all need to work together to provide what is best for the users. Once I understood the long-term view I strongly believed it was not only the right thing to do for users, but the right thing to do for the ecosystem as a whole.

To be clear, we are going to work hard to improve our product, add new functionality, make acquisitions when it’s in the best interest of users and the whole ecosystem at large. Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users. My promise is that we will be consistent in always focusing on what’s best for the user and the ecosystem as a whole and we will be sincere and honest in our communication with you.

To the point that we can, we will try to give more certainty about the areas where we think we can maximize benefit to users. We will continue to focus on what is best for users and we will work together to make sure that we are creating more opportunities for the ecosystem on the whole. We will also admit our mistakes when they are made and the Blackberry client should never have been labeled “official”. It has since been changed and you won’t see that language used with Twitter clients in the future.

This week will hopefully show that we are focused on building a platform that no longer just mirrors twitter.com functionality, but offers you raw utility that provides much greater opportunities to innovate and build durable, valuable businesses. I also want this week to be an opportunity for us to get together and discuss the future of the platform and how we can improve our communication, responsiveness and clarity. We have an open office hours at 10:15am on Thursday at the Hack Day and I invite all of you to come by for a discussion to talk about the future of the platform and help us craft a working relationship that is beneficial for both of us. I will provide a free ticket to anyone from this list that is unable to afford the current price so that they can be part of that discussion. Just email me directly. For those of you who can’t make it to Chirp, it will be live streamed so you can tune in from home — where ever home might be.

As always, you can reach me by email or by phone, 617 763 9904. I am here to listen and provide clarity when possible and you should know we are committed to working with you on this.

Best, Ryan”